Page 170 of Jackie

It’s Artemis who tells me what Fellini’s wife, the actress Giulietta Masina, says: “Myths, when they are human, are fatally subject to wear and tear. Why marvel if a woman at a certain point tears off the veils that cover her like a monument—a thirty-nine-year-old monument, still beautiful, extremely alive, obligated to a role that does not belong to her?”

…

That fall on Skorpios, I learn Greek and how to dance the sirtaki. I ask Ari’s friend Yiannis for lists of books on ancient Greek history, archaeology, art. I visit Artemis in Athens and wander the streets of the old quarter. I start to change things in the house—curtains, rugs. I move the furniture around and relandscape the gardens. One afternoon, reading Cavafy on the terrace, I overhear two of the older workmen grumble, “Winston Churchill’s feet touched these stones, but they’re not good enough for her. Soon, not even Mr. Onassis will be good enough for her.”

When I know Ari is flying in from Athens, I pull things into order. Declutter the house—books neatly closed, magazines in neat piles off to the side, flowers in every vase. When he is with me, we spend each night on the Christina. He sings to me and tells me stories. I read poetry aloud, and as his cigar smoke falls in delicate ropes around us, he tells me about the new business he has brokered with the junta, a factory he’ll build, a new oil refinery. He says it’s the largest investment ever made in Greece.

“The colonels love my new spectacular American wife.”

“I thought I was your Greek wife.”

When I reach for my cigarettes, he swipes the pack from my hand. I swipe it back. No malice. Just a running joke between us. After dinner, we dance on the mosaic deck of the swimming pool. I’m drunk on the ouzo from dinner; I can feel the night roll off me as I take it all in, the warmth, the heady rush of his hands slipping the edge of my blouse off my shoulder as we dance, like he will undress me right there. “My boat,” he would say, “my wife, why shouldn’t I?”

—

I fly to the children in New York; both in school now, it’s harder to peel them away. I come back to Skorpios in early November. I’m alone there. Ari is in Paris. Artemis stays with me.

“After Jack died,” I tell her, “the air was different. I could feel him in it.”

That day is still fire in my head. Molten. Unfinished. And there’s a pain that comes in my neck out of nowhere, then throbs for hours.

I do not tell Artemis this.

—

For the fifth anniversary of Jack’s death, I am with the children. We spend that week at a house I’ve rented in New Jersey. I ride with Caroline. We celebrate John’s eighth birthday on November 25. Caroline turns eleven two days later. Thanksgiving falls late that year, and I feel an aching loss—not just for Jack and Bobby, but for those years gone and all that’s changed.

…

The following summer, the children come to Skorpios for July. One afternoon on the deck of the Christina, Ari tells them the story of Icarus. Caroline’s heard it before but listens politely, keeping her silky distance. John’s face is rapt as Ari tells them about the boy whose father made him wings, and for the first time I wonder, What kind of young man was Icarus? That day in the labyrinth when his father came with his harebrained scheme and drew the route of their flight in the dirt—two bodies like matchsticks with those huge makeshift wings, woven quill, osier, wax. What did Icarus think as his father mapped it all out? Did he feel it then? The need to risk the sky?

—

More than once you said, almost in passing, that my mind was the thing that drew you to me. It was different, you said, it made me different from any other girl.

—

“Time for a swim?” Ari says. I glance up. “Yes or no?” His eyes are fixed on me.

“Sure,” I say.

“You weren’t listening.”

“I was.”

“You should have been. The story of an arrogant young man who aimed too high.”

I don’t want him to see me react, not in front of the children.

“Icarus reached,” I say. “And there’s meaning in that.”

“Don’t rewrite the myth.”

“I’d love a swim.” I stand up, brushing off my shorts. I turn to the children. John jumps to his feet, but Caroline waits, listening, absorbing the harder underside of everything not said.

…

Days before I turn forty, the spacecraft Apollo is launched—an answer to Jack’s pledge to put a man on the moon before the decade’s end. As Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins head toward lunar orbit and the Sea of Tranquility, Teddy drives an Oldsmobile Delmont 88 off the Dike Bridge into Poucha Pond with a girl named Mary Jo in the passenger seat. He gets out of the car and walks away. The girl doesn’t. He waits ten hours before reporting it, for reasons that will never quite be clear. The car is found in the water, upside down, by a boy who’s come to the bridge to fish that Saturday morning. The story is on the front page of the paper the day those astronauts take their first steps.

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